The bug got patched, but it caused a hilarious few days of total confusion.

At first I thought my mind was going. My wife and I, on vacation recently, had just settled in for an episode from the final season of 30 Rock. I had purchased it from Amazon Instant Video for a couple of bucks because Netflix didn't have the final season yet, and if there is one guaranteed benefit to not being a dirty pirate, it's studio-quality audio and video, right?

Imagine my surprise, then, when the volume began subtly modulating. For 30 seconds, Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey were shouting at me; for 30 seconds, they were whispering. Well, crazy things happen—perhaps the version of the episode shipped over to Amazon had been mastered poorly by some summer intern.

My wife and I watched another episode. The volume shenanigans continued. Surely NBC couldn't cock up two entire episodes of a hit show? I began to think dark thoughts about Amazon and its video service, and I would have continued thinking those dark thoughts except that, a day or two later, I dialed up a Daily Show episode on Hulu. Yet again, the volume fluctuated.

At this point I was getting concerned; my computer was clearly possessed by some mischievous but not wholly malevolent gremlin intent on making constant changes to my audio output levels. How else to explain the fact that the issue persisted across different TV shows and across different distribution platforms? (Though I never noticed the issue when I was playing music in iTunes or through my Rdio subscription, which only made the problem odder. It was video-specific.) The only constant seemed to be my computer, one of the recently released 2013 MacBook Airs.

I had never seen a problem quite like this before, but it quickly became clear that my pricey new machine had an issue. Was it fixable through a software update? Was the hardware bad?

Last week, that question was answered as Apple released "MacBook Air (Mid 2013) Software Update 1.0." Finally skimming through the patch change log on Friday, wondering if this was something worth rebooting my computer for at the moment, I stopped short when I came to the final item on the fix list: "an issue which may cause audio volume to fluctuate during video playback."

(The upgrade also fixes "an issue that in rare instances may cause an intermittent loss in wireless connectivity [and] an issue with Adobe Photoshop which may cause occasional screen flickering.")

As it turns out, I am not crazy, my machine isn't broken, and neither Amazon nor NBC were at fault. Rather an odd issue, but how exciting would life be if all the problems we faced were routine?

Ok, here's the weirdest tech thing that ever happened to me. I've been waiting years to tell this story. Back in the 80s I was doing some consulting on Wall St. Of course, I was given a corporate phone number, with voicemail.

One day I saw I had a new voicemail message. I went to listen to it. It was faint and scratchy, kind of hard to hear, but I realized that it was a recording of a phone call I had made several months before on that phone. I hadn't recorded it, there was no record of any recording, and at any rate, what I was hearing didn't sound like a normal recorded phone conversation, it was so degraded and scratchy. But I could still hear what was said.

I still have no reasonable explanation for how a phone call could have been recorded without my knowledge, float around in the voice mail system for months without my knowledge or any notification, degrade in quality, and then show up in my inbox much later. It wasn't a call about some sensitive topic, although since this was a bank, security was tight. W. T. F.

Had a house network set up with media centers playing movies over the LAN, everything was working great. One day it just stopped working; no TVs could play movies from any SMB shares. After days of back and forth it turned out that Windows Live Sync, if installed on any connected machine, messes up SMB shares on the entire network by introducing a new authentication method not supported on older devices.

The bug was in the media devices not correctly handling this rarely used SMB feature, but the net effect was really weird.

My previous system build started life with an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition, a BFG mainboard with NVIDIA chipset, BFG 600W PSU, Sound Blaster X-Fi, 4GB of RAM, and a 8800 GTX.

It refused to even POST.

I pulled out all the sticks of RAM and tested each one individually. Either they were all bad or the problem lie elsewhere.

I put in a new 1000W PSU. Still no luck.

I replaced the mainboard with a DFI LAN Party model (AMD chipset, which I did not want). Still wouldn't POST.

The graphics card was my first PCI-E graphics card, so I had nothing else I could use to test it. Finally, just before I started asking around to see if anyone I knew had one I could borrow, I tried pulling out the sound card.

Behold, the computer POSTed, booted, and was completely stable.

I tried reseating the sound card in a different slot. The computer refused to boot again. So I took it out and left it out. And of course, the store I bought it from went out of business.

A while back, I was selling LANs, back in the coax-cables days ('90s). One of my clients kept having LAN issues after going back from lunch. They investigated and castigated the cleaners, people in the break room, the fridge, the microwave, the network card... no luck.

We finally got called in to fix it, or else. Turns out, early afternoon was the only time the sun got through the window of a small backroom, struck the cable directly, which made the outer plastic dilate just a bit... and since there was a micro-fracture of the conductor inside, that was enough to make the cable fail.

Oh, and that time I was given secretly local admin right at my job and ran windows update...

Just after that, the thumbnails of the files I created made explorer.exe crash on every other computer on the network, including the render farm! Even when not displayed, you just had to browse to a folder and bam! Microsoft issued a very specific hotfix for that a few days later.

Thats not weird, it was quite known for a while back then many Creative cards had issues with various motherboard chipsets, such as those from AMD, Nvidia or VIA. Its one of the first things to test: remove everything non essential and also take it out in case there is a short circuit with the case.

I bought an ASUS ROG laptop, & occasionally with headphones plugged in, sound would still play through the built-in speaker. Turned out to be a known driver issue & easily fixed. All the other strange issues I can think of have been quite obviously the result of a hardware failure.

I quite like the exploding power supply issue on a certain model of slimline HP desktops, a large collection of which were found in a back closet at one of my former jobs. Apparently, some of the internal glue/epoxy in that one specific model's power supply loves to soak up moisture from the air and consistently manage to short out a major current pathway directly into some combustible capacitors. We stopped testing them after "accidentally" placing a fresh one on top of the boss's desk with his power strip switched off after some incredulous comments he made about our horror stories.

Software related, there's nothing quite as unstable as an issue involving shared video memory on a flaky stick of ram. One minute you think the graphics card's failing, the next the computer won't start, then it merely crashes, until it finally all comes back and happens at the same time.

I have a Philips universal remote control, that, if it falls off the sofa and the batteries pop out (as happens a little too often), refuses to work again until the batteries have been fully charged and at least one day has passed.

The strangest fault I had recently was with a classroom "all in one" PC at work, basically a standard desktop pc with speakers in the base and a monitor bolted onto it. A teacher reported that it was making a horrible screeching noise. Get up there and lo and behold, it was. The really strange thing was that I found that I could vary the pitch of the screech and even stop it entirely by waving my hands in front of or touching different parts of the computer, just like a theremin.

Turns out there is a microphone embedded in the top of the monitor that was playing up. Unplugging it shut the thing up

I left my mobile phone on top of the gaming PC one day. When it rang, the DVD tray ejected and the system shut down. I haven't tried to replicate it, and I don't want to

Just a couple of days ago I finally found out the root cause of my weird wireless keyboard issue. I have an Apple Wireless keyboard that I've been using since September, which started having far too frequent dropout issues. It took some testing, but I finally found out that the type of battery I used when the previous ones stopped working were just a fraction too short. The batteries go one after the other in a line, so two slightly too small batteries end up being much too small for a good connection.

The brand is Varta, and I could hear them rattling about if I shook the keyboard. I'll do the shake test every time I replace batteries from now on.

I work in tech support so have many of these odd stories...the weirdest one has to be the guy whose computer rebooted every time he flushed the toilet!

No one believed him but he was phoning every day and was adamant that it was really happening. Eventually we relented and sent an engineer to his house who discovered that he lived in the sticks and had a septic tank with an electric pump to pump the waste into it. The pump was on the same circuit as the socket his computer was plugged into and when it kicked in the current draw was just too high and the computer had its power interrupted! We told him to go get his wiring sorted out and buy a ups in the meantime!

I had a PPC PowerBook. I replaced the RAM one day, and it stopped working. Turns out there was a known issue with the logic board and certain types of RAM. So I had the logic board replaced (at my cost) by the local authorized repair center, took it home - and it stopped working. Returned, new logic board (under warranty now) and new ram (just in case). Took it home and it stopped working. Returned it, new logic board and new analog board. Took it home and it stopped working. This cycle repeated another couple of times... nobody was ever able to work out what was wrong. Apple eventually gave me a nice shiny new intel MacBook Pro at a very steep discount. So it ended up being a win! But how frustrating it was at the time!

Weirdest problem I've seen came from a Dell Optiplex desktop a few years back. I was working at a high school that had ordered 26 for a computer lab and we were setting them all up but 1 refused to turn on. The front lights would start up and the thing would shut down, no post, no screen, no sounds, no fans. So we tried to diagnose the problem and unplugged everything but the bare board, PSU and CPU (with integrated graphics) but still nothing. We had on-site service so a Dell tech came to see what was wrong and replaced the motherboard, same problem, then replaced the PSU, CPU, RAM, HDDs, DVD drive, Case, etc. until every piece was replaced in the computer but it STILL wouldn't boot.... every piece but the front panel connectors that had a sneaky little hard to see cable that was bundled to one of the PSU cables. Turns out there was a short in one of the USB ports on the front panel.

The worst problems are those which aren't weird, they're just embarrassing. Like building a PC for a friend and spending a couple of hours with him trying to work out why it won't boot before you notice you've plugged the cord for the power LED into the reset connector.

My previous system build started life with an Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition, a BFG mainboard with NVIDIA chipset, BFG 600W PSU, Sound Blaster X-Fi, 4GB of RAM, and a 8800 GTX.

It refused to even POST.

I pulled out all the sticks of RAM and tested each one individually. Either they were all bad or the problem lie elsewhere.

I put in a new 1000W PSU. Still no luck.

I replaced the mainboard with a DFI LAN Party model (AMD chipset, which I did not want). Still wouldn't POST.

The graphics card was my first PCI-E graphics card, so I had nothing else I could use to test it. Finally, just before I started asking around to see if anyone I knew had one I could borrow, I tried pulling out the sound card.

Behold, the computer POSTed, booted, and was completely stable.

I tried reseating the sound card in a different slot. The computer refused to boot again. So I took it out and left it out. And of course, the store I bought it from went out of business.

OSX has long had built-in RAID which, among other things, allows you to build concatenated drives, ie just join a bunch of drives together to create a larger drive (but nothing else fancy like striping or mirroring). Suppose what you want to do is create such a larger drive AND have it be encrypted.

You can do this with Core Storage pretty easily. You first create an LVG (the equivalent of a virtual hard drive, made from gluing the smaller drives together), then you create an LV (the equivalent of a virtual partition on the LVG) and set that to be encrypted.

All sounds fine, all is legit according to the Apple man pages for Core Storage, all works fine. EXCEPT: suppose you copy a whole lot of data to your new fancy drive, then unmount the LV (the equivalent of the partition) in preparation for powering down these external drives. WTF???!!! The volume will appear to have unmounted according to Finder and Disk Utility. But there will be substantial disk traffic going on between the various drives of the LVG which you can monitor by hearing their heads moving and seeing their blinking lights (and more fancier tools on the computer if you want to be really sure). Yes indeed, even though you have unmounted the volume, disk activity will continue for many many minutes.

What is going on here? As far as I can tell the situation is:Apple sees you creating a Core Storage LVG from multiple drives. It then thinks "OK, that means I should create Fusion IO for those drives"!!! When you finish copying to the LV, Fusion IO kicks in and thinks this would be a good time to move some data from the first (supposedly SSD part of the Fusion drive) to the other non-SSD part. Unmounting the user-visible part of the experience, the LV (ie the partition) doesn't change anything because Fusion IO works at a lower level, balancing data between physical drives regardless of the partitions on them.

What makes this especially horrifying is that it's universally understood by users that once they unmount a volume (ie "eject it in the Finder") it's safe to power down the external drive. This Fusion IO behind the scenes breaks that contract. Now the only time you know it's safe to power down the drives is after you don't hear any head movement or see any data transfer for a few minutes. Can you imagine the consequences if you shut down one or both of these drives will Fusion IO was doing its random data movement between the various drives?

IMHO having a bug like this is understandable --- if I had thought through all the consequences of the various things Core Storage does I don't know if I would have anticipated it. What is COMPLETELY unacceptable IMHO is Apple's response to this bug which is to say: "Fusion IO is not supported on external drives". This completely misses the point. I don't FSCKING WANT Fusion IO on these drives, supported or otherwise. What I want is Full Disk Encryption. It's your crappy software that is ADDING Fusion IO to this configuration and providing me with no way to disable it.

Will it be fixed in 10.9? Who knows. The people handling public bugs are frequently not the people doing the actual work, so even those we have a fool in the public facing part of the company who simply quite happy to tell the world "Yeah, we know there is a potentially data destroying bug here --- and we don't care", it's possible the people writing the actual code have encountered this for themselves and fixed it.

But I'd say that's the most bizarre recent bug I've encountered, a low-level part of the OS which just keeps on going even though you have (as far as all UI is concerned) totally detached a disk from the system.

(A different but similarly bizarre bug occurred about fifteen years ago. There was a bug in AltiVec in one particular spin of one particular CPU, meaning that a particular AltiVec instruction gave incorrect results. On real MacOS which was the version everyone was running at the time, MacOS at boot time used some facilities on the chip to have this instruction routed to some code which would do the correct thing --- slower, of course, but at least correct. But on OSX apparently no-one had been told of the problem, and so this patch was not applied. So you got the bizarre result, which you could confirm by stepping through the assembly, that on MacOS9 the instruction gave one result, and on OSX it gave a different [and wrong] result. It's bad enough that you never assume, when something goes wrong "OK, the CPU is simply doing the wrong thing", but it's even worse when the CPU does the RIGHT thing with a different OS!)

Back in college, my room mate had an old CRT monitor that suddenly started setting off the smoke detector in our apartment whenever it was on. Turn it off, the smoke detector would stop screeching. On, it'd start. The detector was in the hallway adjacent to his bedroom. Never did figure out why that would happen.

Never did replace it while I knew him, being nearly-broke college students, it was just cheaper to remove the batteries from the smoke detector for the last couple months!

Back in college, my room mate had an old CRT monitor that suddenly started setting off the smoke detector in our apartment whenever it was on. Turn it off, the smoke detector would stop screeching. On, it'd start. The detector was in the hallway adjacent to his bedroom. Never did figure out why that would happen.

Never did replace it while I knew him, being nearly-broke college students, it was just cheaper to remove the batteries from the smoke detector for the last couple months!

That was very reckless, and could have killed you both just to save what, $30 on a CRT monitor? What if the old monitor is releasing some kind of noxious gas that is triggering the smoke detector somehow?

At the shop where I work we have an old HP dc5000 or dc5500 off-lease workstation we use to connect drives to when attempting data recovery on HDDs from PCs that no longer function. The PC behaves perfectly excepting when you try to shut it off, it will power itself right back on again a few seconds later UNLESS a hard drive is connected to the old ATA-100 controller, in which case it will stay off when you tell it to shut down. Having an optical drive connected to the ATA-100 controller doesn't cut it, has to be a hard drive. Otherwise you have to either pull the power cord or when it powers itself back on, or you force it off by holding in the power button for several seconds and it will then stay off. It's more a nuisance than a real problem, so haven't bothered diagnosing it, but weird for sure.

I spent half a day tracking down the source of intermittent Internet flakiness at home. Eventually traced it to the treadmill I'd just bought for my treadmill desk -- when running, it was feeding noise into the electric wiring throughout the house, including near the phone line connecting the modem to the box. Plugged the treadmill into a UPS (taking advantage of its voltage rectification function) and everything went back to normal.

I thought of another. I've had a number of plants that grew towards LCD monitors. Different plants, different monitors. I had one that grew completely in the dim space between the monitor and the wall, away from the window and sunlight.

I had a first generation MacBook Pro. Thing worked very well, especially considering it was Apple's first attempt at making a consumer Intel-based computer - but the machine would occasionally go 'moo'.

Yes, 'moo' - like a cow. It was like living near a dairy farm. Moo.

(Evidence that I'm not completely crazy here. The issue went away with a subsequent firmware update...)

1) WAAAAYYYYYY back in the day, when computer shows were a thing, and Windows 95 was new, my roommate and I decided to pick up some 10-Base-2 NICs with terminators and thinnet coax to connect our two computers (rocking out on IPX/SPX for games and TCP/IP using Sygate for shared 56K USR X2 dial-up internet). This replaced the null-mode cable we had been using and allowed us to have our computers in our actual rooms. The problem was that the network connection, while really great when it worked, was super unstable. When troubleshooting, we'd always move the computers near each other (for convenience), and it always worked flawlessly that way. It only acted up when we were in our separate rooms. It turns out that the apartment we were living in had very old wiring, and there were no common grounds on the outlets. The reason it worked in the same room was because we were connected to the same power strip (common ground). This was fixed with an extension cord.

2) Shortly after we were married, my wife and I moved into an apartment and she was helping me to connect my computer. I asked her to connect the VGA cable to the computer and she asked me "Which way does it go on." I sagely replied "It only goes on one way." So she plugs it in and the screen goes completely ape-shit. I quickly turn off the monitor and jump around to the back of the PC to figure out what went wrong. It turns out that the VGA cable for the monitor had the shield bent a bit and she actually managed to plug it in completely upside down. Needless to say I have never told my wife "It only goes on one way" ever again.

3) When I was a shop technician at a mom-and-pop PC store, I had this one network card that absolutely would not work with this one Ethernet switch. Each device worked perfectly fine with other devices, but not each other.

4) Same job a couple of years later, 52x CDROMs were a thing. I had a few customers come in where they reported a sound like breaking light bulbs coming from the CD ROM drive tray, and taking the drive apart confirmed shattered disks. I even had it happen to one of the shop computers. Some paint jobs on game disks from back then were a little heavier on one side than the other, and when the drive would spin all the way up, sometimes the stress of the unbalanced disks would cause them to explode in the drives. I even wrote to Maximum PC magazine about it in response to an article where the author had said he had heard of this happening but had never encountered it himself. The published my reply in the next month's issue.

Strangest bug was an issue with Opcode's Vision on Mac OS 6.0.7. Called Opcode's tech support and they told me to remove a Word file and reboot. Problem solved. I still do not know why the Word file installed on the Hard Disk caused the problem.